Please upload a statement of 500-1,000 words explaining why you are applying to Yale for graduate study. Describe your research interests and preparation for your intended field(s) of study, including prior research and other relevant experiences. Explain how the faculty, research, and resources at Yale would contribute to your future goals.
The headline kept on circling around my head long after I finished reading it:"One in three TB cases found in Northeast India screening had no symptoms."It was deeply unsettling. After nearly two years of working on national TB elimination projects, amid my surprise was a streak of bewilderment: if people can carry TB without knowing they are ill, how can we ever solve India's TB problem? This was not in stark contrast to my own experiences - millions were being screened nationally, yet many of those at greatest risk remained invisible to the health system.
If two most prominent approached towards TB elimination are considered - community-based active case finding, and targeted public health intervention - one may infer that TB elimination can be accelerated substantially through sophisticated screening methods and advanced diagnostic services targeting the high-risk populations. Perhaps, this demands community health workers (CHWs) to expand their scope of work to identify presumptive TB cases, facilitate diagnosis, enable treatment, and reach the missing populations. However, simplification of solutions can lead to neglect of very real questions. Expansion of community-based services does not by itself tell us how the limited CHW capacity can be prioritized? How similar interventions can perform differently across settings? How to reduce TB transmission across lifespan when implemented at scale? I hope to study these challenges and explore how to expand CHW-led TB care and prevention across life span and how they can be deployed where TB burden is greatest while designing effective, sustainable interventions, that are attentive to CHW well-being. What strategies can translate the implementations into meaningful population-level reductions in TB? The PhD program in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University would provide me unique opportunities to explore my research questions, given the university's exceptional hold in implementation science as applied to infectious diseases. Public health community often exalt the field's multidisciplinary nature, and the epidemiology of microbial diseases program lives up to this in combining the ecological and clinical aspects of infectious diseases; with my interest particularly in disease transmission, community-led intervention across lifespan, and mixed methods research, I would embrace the opportunity to combine rigorous infectious-disease methods with implementation sciences.
I am particularly interested in Professor Lucian Davis's work on patient centric, contextually tailored TB intervention strategies closely mirroring my own interests. Dr. Davis's project on household contact investigation in Uganda highlights the need for theory-informed implementation strategies in resource-constrained settings, while opening opportunities to use micro-randomized trials to identify active components and human-centered design to better tailor strategies to end users. I learned through my correspondence with Dr. Davis that my interests in post-TB care, community-engaged research, and mixed-methods approaches closely align with his work and I can tell that working on his project as a postgraduate researcher in TB detection and implementation would help me build the skills to pursue my own research questions. I am also drawn to complementary work of Professor Theodore Cohen and Professor Alison Galvani, whose research collectively reflects the questions I hope to pursue. Dr. Cohen's research on TB transmission, spatial epidemiology, and genomic approaches to identifying where disease spreads most intensely provide a framework for asking where scarce case-finding resources should be concentrated. Dr. Cohen's work on TB transmission and spatial epidemiology would allow me to deepen my skills in identifying where case-finding resources are most needed, while I would bring experience designing and evaluating large-scale TB programs in rural and tribal India to ground these approaches in implementation realities. On other hand, Dr. Galvani's infectious-disease modelling and health-economic analyses align with my interest in identifying high-impact TB interventions at scale where I would bring an implementation perspective while learning to translate real-world constraints into policy-relevant models.
My aunt was among India's first ASHAs, recruited in 2005. Growing up, I saw her work closely with the community. This epistemic position shaped my master's dissertation. I designed and led a qualitative study examining work-life balance, psychological well-being, and coping among CHWs in rural India. I found that their effectiveness was shaped not only by training or incentives, but also by gendered household responsibilities, emotional strain, and limited institutional support. I translated these findings into an empirical framework and policy recommendations for strengthening CHW well-being. More recently, my work at Piramal Foundation provided me the opportunity to work extensively on nation TB elimination efforts through community-based mixed method approaches. I have contributed to strategies on post-TB survivorship for hard-to-reach tribal populations in North-East India. I developed implementation strategies for national TB elimination project across 13 states in India developed with Stop TB Partnership with a focus on active case findings with handheld AI-enabled X Ray, molecular doorstep diagnostics, TB preventive treatment adherence, and differentiated care, through community and institutional actors. These TB elimination efforts by Piramal Foundation have showed both the promise and limitations. Despite community mobilization, extensive screening, high rates of treatment initiation, yet still leave gap whether the people who receive the support are those contributing most to TB transmission or whether a different deployment of the same resources might have produced greater impact. Thus, my community-based research experience, learnings on CHWs, and extensive work on TB prepare me well to join the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases PhD program at Yale University.
I envision my future self as a professor at a school of public health or an infectious diseases epidemiologist at some research institution, developing and evaluating community-based strategies to improve TB transmission across lifespan. I want to teach and conduct research on community centric TB care and prevention methods. I hope my doctoral research can help shape how communities and health systems work together to advance TB elimination. I want to bring this learning back to India, the country bearing the world's largest TB burden, and contribute to stronger elimination efforts. Yale's Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases program would be an ideal place to pursue this work by connecting infectious-disease transmission with the systems that determine whether prevention succeeds.
Word Count: 893
The headline kept on circling around my head long after I finished reading it:"One in three TB cases found in Northeast India screening had no symptoms."It was deeply unsettling. After nearly two years of working on national TB elimination projects, amid my surprise was a streak of bewilderment: if people can carry TB without knowing they are ill, how can we ever solve India's TB problem? This was not in stark contrast to my own experiences - millions were being screened nationally, yet many of those at greatest risk remained invisible to the health system.
If two most prominent approached towards TB elimination are considered - community-based active case finding, and targeted public health intervention - one may infer that TB elimination can be accelerated substantially through sophisticated screening methods and advanced diagnostic services targeting the high-risk populations. Perhaps, this demands community health workers (CHWs) to expand their scope of work to identify presumptive TB cases, facilitate diagnosis, enable treatment, and reach the missing populations. However, simplification of solutions can lead to neglect of very real questions. Expansion of community-based services does not by itself tell us how the limited CHW capacity can be prioritized? How similar interventions can perform differently across settings? How to reduce TB transmission across lifespan when implemented at scale? I hope to study these challenges and explore how to expand CHW-led TB care and prevention across life span and how they can be deployed where TB burden is greatest while designing effective, sustainable interventions, that are attentive to CHW well-being. What strategies can translate the implementations into meaningful population-level reductions in TB? The PhD program in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University would provide me unique opportunities to explore my research questions, given the university's exceptional hold in implementation science as applied to infectious diseases. Public health community often exalt the field's multidisciplinary nature, and the epidemiology of microbial diseases program lives up to this in combining the ecological and clinical aspects of infectious diseases; with my interest particularly in disease transmission, community-led intervention across lifespan, and mixed methods research, I would embrace the opportunity to combine rigorous infectious-disease methods with implementation sciences.
I am particularly interested in Professor Lucian Davis's work on patient centric, contextually tailored TB intervention strategies closely mirroring my own interests. Dr. Davis's project on household contact investigation in Uganda highlights the need for theory-informed implementation strategies in resource-constrained settings, while opening opportunities to use micro-randomized trials to identify active components and human-centered design to better tailor strategies to end users. I learned through my correspondence with Dr. Davis that my interests in post-TB care, community-engaged research, and mixed-methods approaches closely align with his work and I can tell that working on his project as a postgraduate researcher in TB detection and implementation would help me build the skills to pursue my own research questions. I am also drawn to complementary work of Professor Theodore Cohen and Professor Alison Galvani, whose research collectively reflects the questions I hope to pursue. Dr. Cohen's research on TB transmission, spatial epidemiology, and genomic approaches to identifying where disease spreads most intensely provide a framework for asking where scarce case-finding resources should be concentrated. Dr. Cohen's work on TB transmission and spatial epidemiology would allow me to deepen my skills in identifying where case-finding resources are most needed, while I would bring experience designing and evaluating large-scale TB programs in rural and tribal India to ground these approaches in implementation realities. On other hand, Dr. Galvani's infectious-disease modelling and health-economic analyses align with my interest in identifying high-impact TB interventions at scale where I would bring an implementation perspective while learning to translate real-world constraints into policy-relevant models.
My aunt was among India's first ASHAs, recruited in 2005. Growing up, I saw her work closely with the community. This epistemic position shaped my master's dissertation. I designed and led a qualitative study examining work-life balance, psychological well-being, and coping among CHWs in rural India. I found that their effectiveness was shaped not only by training or incentives, but also by gendered household responsibilities, emotional strain, and limited institutional support. I translated these findings into an empirical framework and policy recommendations for strengthening CHW well-being. More recently, my work at Piramal Foundation provided me the opportunity to work extensively on nation TB elimination efforts through community-based mixed method approaches. I have contributed to strategies on post-TB survivorship for hard-to-reach tribal populations in North-East India. I developed implementation strategies for national TB elimination project across 13 states in India developed with Stop TB Partnership with a focus on active case findings with handheld AI-enabled X Ray, molecular doorstep diagnostics, TB preventive treatment adherence, and differentiated care, through community and institutional actors. These TB elimination efforts by Piramal Foundation have showed both the promise and limitations. Despite community mobilization, extensive screening, high rates of treatment initiation, yet still leave gap whether the people who receive the support are those contributing most to TB transmission or whether a different deployment of the same resources might have produced greater impact. Thus, my community-based research experience, learnings on CHWs, and extensive work on TB prepare me well to join the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases PhD program at Yale University.
I envision my future self as a professor at a school of public health or an infectious diseases epidemiologist at some research institution, developing and evaluating community-based strategies to improve TB transmission across lifespan. I want to teach and conduct research on community centric TB care and prevention methods. I hope my doctoral research can help shape how communities and health systems work together to advance TB elimination. I want to bring this learning back to India, the country bearing the world's largest TB burden, and contribute to stronger elimination efforts. Yale's Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases program would be an ideal place to pursue this work by connecting infectious-disease transmission with the systems that determine whether prevention succeeds.
Word Count: 893
